home care health: Vitamin - Vitamin Supplements: Good For You? Dangerous? @ Katherine Tallmadge, MA, RD

A vitamin is an organic molecule (or a set of molecules contiguously connected chemically, i.e. vitamers) that is an critical micronutrient which an organism needs in small quantities for the proper in force of its metabolism. essential nutrients cannot be synthesized in the organism, either at every or not in enough quantities, and so must be obtained through the diet. Vitamin C can be synthesized by some species but not by others; it is not a vitamin in the first instance but is in the second. The term vitamin does not swell the three other groups of necessary nutrients: minerals, necessary fatty acids, and valuable amino acids. Most vitamins are not single molecules, but groups of associated molecules called vitamers. For example, there are eight vitamers of vitamin E: four tocopherols and four tocotrienols. Some sources list fourteen vitamins, by including choline, but major health organizations list thirteen: vitamin A (as all-trans-retinol, all-trans-retinyl-esters, as with ease as all-trans-beta-carotene and supplementary provitamin A carotenoids), vitamin B1 (thiamine), vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B3 (niacin), vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid), vitamin B6 (pyridoxine), vitamin B7 (biotin), vitamin B9 (folic bitter or folate), vitamin B12 (cobalamins), vitamin C (ascorbic acid), vitamin D (calciferols), vitamin E (tocopherols and tocotrienols), and vitamin K (phylloquinone and menaquinones).

Vitamins have diverse biochemical functions. Vitamin A acts as a regulator of cell and tissue lump and differentiation. Vitamin D provides a hormone-like function, changeable mineral metabolism for bones and new organs. The B highbrow vitamins be in as enzyme cofactors (coenzymes) or the precursors for them. Vitamins C and E do its stuff as antioxidants. Both deficient and excess intake of a vitamin can potentially cause clinically significant illness, although excess intake of water-soluble vitamins is less likely to reach so.

Before 1935, the isolated source of vitamins was from food. If intake of vitamins was lacking, the repercussion was vitamin nonappearance and consequent nonappearance diseases. Then, commercially produced tablets of yeast-extract vitamin B rarefied and semi-synthetic vitamin C became available.

This was followed in the 1950s by the enlargement production and publicity of vitamin supplements, including multivitamins, to prevent vitamin deficiencies in the general population. Governments mandated addition of vitamins to staple foods such as flour or milk, referred to as food fortification, to prevent deficiencies. Recommendations for folic bitter supplementation during pregnancy edited risk of infant neural tube defects.

The term vitamin is derived from the word vitamine, which was coined in 1912 by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, who deserted a puzzling of micronutrients critical to life, every of which he presumed to be amines. similar to this presumption was difficult sure not to be true, the "e" was dropped from the name. every vitamins were discovered (identified) together with 1913 and 1948.

Remember: You Need Vitamin E - The Linus Pauling Institute